English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama

ISBN-13: 9780521810562 / Angielski / Twarda / 2003 / 270 str.

Mary Floyd-Wilson

Opis

Drawing on classical and contemporary medical texts, histories, and cosmographies, Mary Floyd-Wilson demonstrates that the Renaissance understanding of identities contradicted many modern stereotypes concerning racial and ethnic differences. English writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries labored to reinvent ethnology to their own advantage, paving the way for the invention of more familiar racial ideas. Floyd-Wilson highlights these English revisionary efforts in her transformational readings of the period's drama; including Marlowe's Tamburlaine, Jonson's The Masque of Blackness, and Shakespeare's Othello and Cymbeline.

Recenzje

"Mary Floyd-Wilson's study of English ethnicity offers an important contribution to the study of race in the early modern period. Its account of geohumoral ethnology is innovative and fascinating." Seventeenth-Century News

Spis treści

List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the marginal English; Part I. Climatic Culture: The Transmissions and Transmutations of Ethnographic Knowlege: 1. The ghost of Hippocrates: geohumoral history in the West; 2. British ethnology; 3. An inside story of race: melancholy and ethnology; Part II. The English Ethnographic Theatre: 4. Tamburlaine and the staging of white barbarity; 5. Temperature and temperance in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness; 6. Othello's jealousy; 7. Cymbeline's angels; Notes; Index.